Listener Support: accept monthly donations from your listeners

Activating Listener Support allows you to add a Support button to your Anchor profile. Any listener can pledge a monthly recurring amount to support your podcast – they don’t even need to have an Anchor account, so it’s incredibly fast and easy to start collecting contributions.

To activate Listener Support for your podcast, log into anchor.fm and navigate to your Settings. Enable Listener Support by clicking the button under the ‘Money’ section of your Settings. You will then need to set up a Stripe account (they’re the third-party platform we use to help process payments) and add your payment information to finish activating the feature.

The final step is to search your inbox for an email called "Welcome to Stripe!" which includes a link to verify your email and start getting paid. Once your account is verified, you'll be able to start accepting payments from your listeners. This can take up to 24 hours; we'll notify you as soon as it's active!

Troubleshooting Listener Support activation:

You can only use a debit card or bank account to set up Stripe; whichever account you use is where your money will go when you cash out your payments from your Anchor Wallet.

If you’ve used the ‘Music’ tool to add copyrighted songs to any of your episodes on Anchor, you won’t be able to enable Listener Support until you have removed all music from your existing episodes. For legal reasons, monetization features can only be used by podcasts that do not feature third-party music. Note that this doesn't apply to music you own the rights to and added manually into your podcast episodes.

Listener Support is currently only available for creators in the US, but listeners can support your podcast from anywhere in the world. If you're not located in the US and you’re interested in getting access to Listener Support, let us know! We'll base future availability on interest for each country.

After you enable Listener Support in your account, you will be able to access the money you receive in Anchor by logging in to anchor.fm and clicking ‘In your wallet’ under the balance in your dashboard. (Note that it is not currently possible to manage your balance natively in the Anchor mobile app, but you can manage it from your phone by logging into anchor.fm from any mobile browser.)

Customize your message to supporters:

When supporters view your podcast profile and click the option to support your podcast, they will see a customized message from you as to why they should support and what the money will be used for! To alter this, go to your Anchor settings in the Anchor website and find the 'Money' section.

Edit the customized message and click 'Save' at the bottom to save this message to your potential supporters!

Using Listener Support with multiple accounts:

If you have multiple podcasts on Anchor and use the same email address to set up Listener Support, your balance will be combined across accounts. For example, if you have $5 from Podcast A and $10 from Podcast B, you’ll see a $15 balance in both accounts. Cashing out from either account will cash out your entire balance across all your podcasts.

If you don’t want to combine balances for multiple podcasts, just use a different email address each time you activate Listener Support and set up Stripe.

Supporting a Podcast:

To support a podcast from its Anchor profile, click ‘Support this podcast’ at the top of the page.

What to do next:

Choose the pricing tier you wish to use (all of these will renew monthly automatically)

Note: You won’t see the option to support a podcast if the Anchor creator hasn’t enabled Listener Support for their podcast. If there’s a podcast you’d love to support who hasn’t done this yet, let them know! We’re sure they’d love to hear from you.

After signing up to support a podcast, you'll receive a confirmation email from Anchor. If at any time you want to cancel your subscription, just click the link in your original confirmation email to update it.

If you’re looking for more information on refunds or canceling your subscription please refer to this help article.